Note from Professor Helen Tilley: On March 18, I submitted this letter on behalf of its signatories to Northwestern’s Board of Trustees, including the chair, Mr. Peter Barris. It has been signed by 287 faculty across schools, including approximately 10% of tenure-line faculty.
The breakdown by school is: Weinberg College: 145 faculty; Feinberg School of Medicine: 50 faculty; McCormick School of Engineering: 27 faculty; School of Communications: 24 faculty; Pritzker School of Law: 15 faculty; Medill School of Journalism: 14 faculty; School of Education and Social Policy: 9 faculty; and Kellogg School of Business: 3 faculty.
The Chair of the Board is meeting with the Faculty Senate on April 9 and it seems fitting for this letter to be part of the public record at this point.
An Open Letter to Northwestern’s Board of Trustees:
We are an ad hoc group of concerned Northwestern faculty and we write to request that the Board of Trustees add consultations with faculty, students, and staff to your deliberations during this emergency. We would like an opportunity to brief members of the Board about how the current threats to higher education, civil liberties, and democratic institutions in the United States and beyond are affecting our campus community. The stakes of this moment are high for us all and we need to pull together.
Many of you have invested deeply in Northwestern over the years. We have too. Many of us began our careers here and have spent decades building programs, directing departments, chairing committees, and doing our part to make Northwestern a premier institution in STEM fields, education, medical research, humanities and the arts, the social sciences, journalism, and law, among other fields. We are deliberately working to bridge schools and disciplines because we know Northwestern is greater than the sum of its parts.
In advance of briefings, we want to share our diagnosis of the current situation.
1. There is no time to lose:
The new administration is taking steps that are intended to radically destabilize the foundations of higher education in this country. It takes decades to build first-rate programs of the kind Northwestern has in abundance. When crucial funding and staff are cut on so many fronts simultaneously – as this administration is doing – it can serve only one purpose: to destroy precious repositories of knowledge, expertise, and public goods. Historically, we know that when autocratic leaders have targeted their own universities, it has only weakened democracies and exacerbated or re-entrenched inequalities. We see this happening already.
2. Young people need us:
We teach our students to wrestle with big questions and societal challenges, placing these in historical context and tying them to debates at the cutting edge of different fields. We have a responsibility as educators to support critical inquiry, engage with multiple perspectives, and explore different knowledge systems, past and present. Given our role in training teachers, doctors, psychologists, counselors, coaches and many others, disruptions to universities have immediate and widespread effects on our society, including K-12 systems.
3. We must speak with one voice in defense of our freedoms:
The Trump administration is breaking laws and trampling on governing norms as fast as possible because they know legal challenges and court proceedings move slowly. On February 4th, Georgetown law professor David Super made this point to a Washington Post reporter: “So many of these [administrative actions] are so wildly illegal that I think they’re playing a quantity game and assuming the system can’t react to all this illegality all at once.” Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian of fascism at New York University, stated that “We’re in a real emergency situation for our democracy.”
Northwestern is one of several thousand universities and colleges in the United States. Our collective goal should be to defend our freedoms and call out illegalities as if our lives, and so many others, depend on it, because they do. Malicious and bad faith attacks – on faculty, students, staff, our president, our provost, our research, and our curriculum – should not go unchallenged. Nothing less than free speech, academic freedom, rights of assembly, rights of due process, and rights to dissent are on the line.
4. We must not repeat myths or falsehoods:
US universities have an unparalleled breadth of intellectual opinion and are home to diverse constituencies. Yet, as most of us know, things were once much more homogeneous. It took decades of effort and social struggle to make universities more representative of and responsive to the needs of our society. In doing so, universities have played a crucial role in building more tolerant and equitable communities. What we are seeing now is a backlash of intolerance and exclusion, designed to intimidate and silence a plurality of perspectives and debate itself. Universities provide a necessary antidote to false claims because we endorse debate.
5. We must protect those who stand for human rights and peace:
We would never expect members of the Board of Trustees to have uniform opinions since we ourselves disagree on points of substance. We do expect Board members to share our concern when constitutional and human rights are objectively under attack. Students, staff, and faculty at Northwestern have mobilized on various social, environmental, and geopolitical issues for decades. These campaigns have sought to extend human rights, redress past and ongoing wrongs, and ensure viable futures for all. Serious problems on all fronts will only get worse if US universities comply with draconian directives to arrest, expel, deport, or fire those who dissent from government policies. These directives are anathema to the values and mission of our University.
We hope that in this moment of crisis, you will make the time to hear from representative delegations and begin to exchange strategies on what we can do to sustain the vibrant intellectual community at Northwestern.
Helen Tilley, Professor, History, Anthropology and Law
Shirin Vossoughi, Professor, Learning Sciences
Martha Biondi, Professor, Black Studies and History
Leslie Harris, Professor, Black Studies and History
Luis A. Nunes Amaral, Professor, ESAM
Jorge Coronado, Professor, Spanish and Portuguese
Kate Masur, Professor, History
Michelle Birkett, Professor, Medical Social Sciences
Daisy Hernández, Professor, English
Peter Sporn, Professor, Medicine
Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Professor, Religious Studies, Political Science
Joanna Grisinger, Professor, Legal Studies
Megan Bang, Professor, Learning Sciences
Rebecca Zorach, Professor, Art History
Rosemary Braun, Professor, Molecular Biosciences
Nitasha Sharma, Professor, Asian American and Black Studies
Michael Peshkin, Professor, Mechanical Engineering
Namratha Kandula, Professor, Medicine
Sean Hanretta, Professor, History
Sarah Schulman, Professor, English
Vilna Bashi, Professor, Sociology
The 21 faculty listed contributed to the letter’s contents before its submission to the Board of Trustees and wider circulation. If you would like to respond publicly to this op-ed, send a Letter to the Editor to [email protected]. The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect the views of all staff members of The Daily Northwestern.
